the
alphabet that most of the world uses today: it appears likely that most
alphabetic writing systems that have ever existed came from one
original source. the alphabet was invented once. and it's been
borrowed over and over again ever since.

resisted arrest, successfully. biking slowly on the main
road, traffic cop says stop. my mind doesn't register what he wants
until ten feet later when i pass his partner who points at the first
officer and also says stop. now i comprehend, continue anyway, the
cycling equivalent of a saunter. no change in my pace or demeanor, they
stay silent as i drift away. because, fuck those guys: i need to hurry
home to eat chicken biryani and watch ken burns in my underwear.
hakuna matata, i ran four 10ks past that police station last week, they
could have tried harder to impede me, surely gave up due to
unmistakeable european descent. but i've freed up two lucifers' time to
extract bribes from someone else. denying white privilege deserves its
own icd-10 code.

some
indians came begging us to cure them of terrible headaches. surely
extraordinary men like us, they said, embodied powers over nature. when
we made the sign of the cross over them, and commended them to god,
they instantly said all pain had vanished, and gave us prickly pears and
chunks of venison.

we walked on their internals and did not know it in the high grass

during
the civil war, philip sheridan had so thoroughly stripped the bountiful
shenandoah valley he liked to claim that a crow wishing to fly over the
valley had to carry its own rations

$16,000 per mile
of level track, $32,000 in the plateaus, and $48,000 in the
mountains..leland stanford, governor of california and president of
the central pacific railroad, persuaded a malleable geologist, professor
josiah whitney, to declare the gently-sloping sacramento valley a
mountainous region so that the central pacific could collect the highest
possible rate for laying track across it. a grateful california
legislature later named its highest peak mount whitney in the
professor's honor.

everything that the audience sees is indians attacking whites. this is the strange story of an inverted conquest. it's a celebration of conquest in which the conquerors are the victims..we didn't plan it, they attacked us, and when we ended up we had the whole continent.

by the time guthrie was only one month old, it had a hotel, general stores, three newspapers, and fifty saloons